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father had reached the concession tent and had become absorbed by the menu hanging over an ice-cream counter before he started on his way deeper into the fairground.
    The farther he went into the carnival, the more crowded the place became. Mostly kids—mostly teenagers, at that, in pairs and in groups. A large portion of the other kids were dressed like him, jeans and sweatshirts, light jackets, but a few were definitely getting into the spirit of the thing. From face paint, all the way up to the kinds of costumes you had to go into the city to buy. Television characters, political figures, and then all the standards: witches and goblins and monsters of various sizes and shapes.
    Charlie was so busy looking at all the costumes, he almost walked right past the wooden sign hanging between two poles, set about eight feet off the ground, pointing toward the entrance to a brightly colored tent. Charlie almost laughed out loud, thinking that he was more like his father than he realized; really, the sign should have been hard to miss. It was at least five feet long, and the letters emblazoned across the wood were in a font that was supposed to mimic Old English:
Midway Games
    Being the kind of kid that he was, Charlie had headed straight to the school library after his chance meeting with Finn. He’d heard the word before, “midway,” and he had a vague idea of what it meant. Midway games were essentially carnival games, the things he’d been playing since he was little, the games that most kids looked forward to when they went to fairs and carnivals. The ring toss, baseballs thrown at milk bottles, coins thrown at ceramic plates, fishing poles used to catch plastic fish, water guns shot into the mouths clowns, etc., etc., etc. But even knowing the definition of the word—well, it seemed like such a strange thing for Finn to have mentioned as a meeting place at the Halloween Fair. So Charlie had decided to add to his knowledge with a little extra research.
    It hadn’t taken him more than twenty minutes at a computer in the library to find out pretty much all there was to know about midway games. He had been surprised to find that they dated a whole lot further back than he’d realized, all the way to the Renaissance, a time period near the end of the Middle Ages that conjured up visions of lavish artwork and royal courts often throwing elaborate masquerade parties. At some point during those elaborate royal parties, it turned out, jousting and swordfights had given way to simpler games involvingcards, wheels, balls—things that people could play that didn’t lead to loss of limbs.
    Hundreds of years later, these games made their way to America. Then, in the late nineteenth century, the city of Chicago was home to a World’s Fair, during which the first Ferris wheel debuted. The modern versions of the Renaissance games had been set up to entertain the people waiting for their turn on the wheel, and from that moment, the name Midway stuck, in tribute to the area of Chicago where the fair had taken place.
    Midway games had become standard at every fair, carnival, and circus. Charlie didn’t know anyone who hadn’t tried his hand at tossing a ring around the neck of a bottle at least once, or knocking a pyramid of milk bottles down with a baseball.
    Stepping through the threshold of the tent, Charlie felt a familiar tweak of excitement as his eyes took in the various games spread out across the tent’s vast interior. The first thing that struck him were all the colors, from the huge stuffed animals that hung in tethered clusters above the various gaming booths, to the lights that were strung along every table, post, and pole in the tent. So much color, it was almost hard to concentrate on any one thing for very long. Adding to the visual cacophony, the air was thick with the mixed scent ofcotton candy, spilled soda, and sawdust from the floor.
    Once he’d gotten acclimated to